What Ties Us Together? Explaining Synchronized GDP Volatility with Lorenzo Ductor and Danilo Leiva-León. Economics Letters
Amid heightened policy uncertainty, understanding the drivers of global macroeconomic instability becomes increasingly critical. This paper studies the determinants of output volatility synchronization using data for 42 economies worldwide. We construct a bilateral time-varying index of volatility synchronization and infer its drivers using Bayesian Model Averaging, complemented by Weighted Average Least Squares and LASSO. We find that differences in total factor productivity, interest rate, and fiscal policy volatility robustly explain cross-country synchronization, with important nuances between developed and developing countries. Overall, the results highlight the role of technological divergence and macroeconomic policy uncertainty in shaping the international co-movement of output volatility.
Working Papers
When the Going Gets Though: the Impact of Health Shocks on Divorce with Anna Sanz de Galdeano and Daniela Vuri
Does illness break marriages? We analyze how unexpected health shocks— sudden diagnoses of cancer, stroke, or heart attack—affect couple dissolution among older adults (50+). Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study and a quasi-experimental design comparing affected households to those experiencing similar shocks later, we find that health crises increase divorce probability by 19% relative to the baseline rate. This effect builds gradually rather than emerging immediately. We examine three explanatory channels: mental health deterioration, cognitive decline, and financial strain. The evidence indicates these factors play important roles in understanding how health shocks destabilize marriages in later life.
The Hidden Toll of Parental ADRD: Causal Effects on Adult Children
What are the consequences of a parental diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) for adult children? I examine its effects on several outcomes using sixteen biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Study and a quasi-experimental design that exploits variation in the timing of diagnosis. A parental diagnosis leads adult children to devote more time to caregiving: informal care increases by 150 hours per wave, while their spouses provide an additional 58 hours. Full retirement increases by 8.6 percentage points and employment declines by 6.9 percentage points, with neither effect reversing within the observation period. Depressive symptoms increase by 0.08 standard deviations, and parental nursing home residence rises from 1.9 to 20.0 percent. These effects vary across families: daughters increase their caregiving by 175 hours per wave more than sons, while parents of sons are 8 percentage points more likely to enter a nursing home. The caregiving response is also substantially larger when the mother, rather than the father, is diagnosed. I find no differences by household wealth and no effects on the financial support adult children provide to their own children or on the employment of this younger generation.
Work In Progress
One Shock, Many Ripples: The Wide-Reaching Consequences of Health Shocks in Old Age with Anna Sanz de Galdeano and Marco Bertoni